The Next Big Thing is a 2011 comedy graphic adventure game developed by the Spanish company Pendulo Studios and published by Focus Home Interactive. The spiritual successor to Pendulo's Hollywood Monsters (1997), it takes place in an alternate-history 1940s Hollywood where real monsters portray themselves in monster movies. The game follows reporters Dan Murray and Liz Allaire as they uncover a conspiracy within the film industry. Assuming control of Dan and Liz, the player navigates the game world, converses with non-player characters and solves puzzles.

Pendulo began developing The Next Big Thing in the late 2000s, after years of fan requests in Southern Europe for a sequel to Hollywood Monsters. The company planned the project as a remake, but decided that the original game's design flaws—and what the developers retrospectively called its "male chauvinist" outlook—necessitated an overhaul. Pendulo reworked the puzzles, game structure, plot and characters, dedicating significant time to the creation of protagonist Liz Allaire. The game was produced in roughly 18 months by a team of 12 to 15 people.

The Next Big Thing received generally favorable reviews, according to Metacritic, but was a commercial bomb upon its initial release for computers. The game's performance hurt Pendulo's business relationships and forced the team to rethink its style; Pendulo moved away from comedy to create Yesterday, its first fully dramatic title. The Next Big Things later port for iOS saw more commercial success, but earned moderate reviews.

Gameplay

The Next Big Thing is a graphic adventure game set in a 2D environment and controlled with a point-and-click interface. Progression through the game is linear; the story is segmented into discrete scenes, each of which begins with a list of the player's goals at that moment. The player advances the plot by exploring the game world, speaking with non-player characters via dialogue trees, collecting items and solving puzzles. Most puzzles require the player to use or combine items, although minigames and conversation-based puzzles appear as well. The Next Big Thing features three difficulty modes: the lowest offers a hint system and allows the player to highlight all interactive hotspots on the screen; the middle difficulty omits the hint system; and the highest omits both.

Plot Concept and characters The Next Big Thing takes place in Hollywood during an alternate-history 1940s, in which real monsters act in monster movies. MKO Pictures, run by the monster businessman William A. FitzRandolph, dominates this monster-movie industry. The two player characters are reporters Liz Allaire and Dan Murray of the fictional newspaper The Quill. Dan, described by Destructoid as "arrogant and self-destructive", is a veteran sportswriter recently demoted to the society pages. Liz is young, wealthy and eager to prove herself as a journalist, but, according to Marca Player, she suffers from every psychic pathology, from Asperger syndrome to multiple personalities. Gameblog declared her "borderline schizo". Liz and Dan share a mutually-hostile, frenemy relationship marked by arguments, insults and traces of romantic attraction.

The game's story is told by a narrator whose appearance Europa Press compared to that of actor Sean Connery. He breaks down the player's goals in each leg of the plot, and provides puzzle hints on the lowest difficulty setting. The story features a number of monster characters, such as the Poet of Pain, a large creature who injures himself to gather material for new poems; Big Albert, a muscular humanoid implanted with the brain of a Nobel Prize winner; Professor Fly, a mutant blend of human and fly; Krom-Ha, an undead queen from Egypt; and the Immaterial Man. Robot characters, owned by FitzRandolph, appear as well. The game borrows its premise and multiple plot elements from its predecessor Hollywood Monsters, including the Quill news agency and large sections of that game's first chapter. Liz and Dan fill the roles of Hollywood Monsters protagonists Sue Bergman and Ron Ashman, while Professor Fly, the Poet of Pain and FitzRandolph respectively replace Dr. Fly, Junior and the film producer Otto Hannover from the first game.

Synopsis The Next Big Thing begins as Liz Allaire and Dan Murray arrive in Hollywood to cover the Horror Movie Awards, which recognize the achievements of monster actors. She interviews celebrities at the theater while he drinks alone in the car. When Liz leaves the party, she sees Big Albert sneaking into the office of William A. FitzRandolph's nearby mansion and decides to investigate; Dan remains behind. Exploring the mansion and meeting with FitzRandolph, Liz comes across two tickets to a boxing match of interest to Dan, which she promises him in exchange for his distracting FitzRandolph and clearing her path to the office. She breaks in to find Big Albert rummaging through FitzRandolph's desk, but he escapes out the window. Deducing that he plans to meet with the Immaterial Man in FitzRandolph's warehouse, Liz activates her tape recorder and walks inside, only to find Big Albert unconscious. The Immaterial Man asks for her help, and she agrees.

The next day, Liz has vanished and Dan—still hoping to get the boxing match tickets, and under threat of losing his job at The Quill—looks for clues to her whereabouts. He comes across Liz's tape recorder, which reveals that she and the Immaterial Man had hidden Big Albert inside a sarcophagus before being kidnapped by an evil scientist. With Big Albert as his only lead, Dan tracks the sarcophagus to Krom-Ha's temple. By losing his job, using the Poet of Pain's unhinged poetry to answer a Rorschach test and pretending to have only 19 days left to live, he convinces Professor Fly to use him as a test subject for an experimental teleportation device that will take him to Krom-Ha. Once there, he impersonates Amenhotep III and becomes Krom-Ha's lover until he finds a way to access the sarcophagus. He brings Big Albert back to Professor Fly, but discovers that Albert's brain is missing.

Meanwhile, FitzRandolph is shown to be in possession of the brain. Liz is now his dinner guest on his private zeppelin: she and the Immaterial Man had been imprisoned by the scientist Dr. Zelssius, one of FitzRandolph's employees. While Liz plans to escape with the brain, FitzRandolph repeatedly tells her that her mind will change within the hour. She begins to experience headaches, but manages to knock FitzRandolph out and steal the brain, returning to Dan and Professor Fly on a motorcycle. The revived Big Albert explains that FitzRandolph and Dr. Zelssius are using brain implants to control people, moments before FitzRandolph enters with his robots and Liz, revealed to be implanted, comes under his control. Back in his laboratory, Dr. Zelssius straps Dan into a chair and prepares to implant him.

With the help of Professor Fly, Dan breaks free, subdues Dr. Zelssius and captures Liz. Her implant snaps when they try to remove it, trapping Liz in her own subconscious mind. She overcomes a series of psychological problems while Dan pumps her for the tickets' location. He then, pretending to be implanted, visits FitzRandolph's headquarters to help Professor Fly free the others subjected to mind control. Dan finds the tickets in Liz's purse, and Liz escapes from Dr. Zelssius's control. It is revealed that FitzRandolph is using those implanted to help his own political campaign, in an effort to combat societal bias against monsters. Bribing the two most infamous monster actors with the tickets, Dan helps Liz shoot a negative political ad that exposes FitzRandolph, who unwittingly airs it and ruins himself. Dan and Liz's scoop gets Dan rehired at The Quill, and a flashforward shows the two as an old married couple: Dan was the unnamed narrator throughout the game.

Development Pendulo Studios began planning what would become The Next Big Thing in the late 2000s, during Runaway: A Twist of Fates development. The company's initial idea was to create a high-definition remake of its 1997 title Hollywood Monsters, which had been a hit in Pendulo's home country of Spain. Fan requests for another Hollywood Monsters game had been ongoing for years, and Pendulo had considered the option as early as 1998, only for the project to evolve into Runaway: A Road Adventure (2001). The company dropped further hints of a sequel during Runaways development. Pendulo's art director Rafael Latiegui summarized: "To each new game that we have been making, the reaction of the Spanish public has been the same: 'When is the next Hollywood Monsters?'" This pressure from fans was a key incentive to make The Next Big Thing. Other factors included Pendulo's desire to break away from the Runaway series, and to shorten pre-production and development of its next game by combining a proven concept with the studio's new engine technology.

Because the Hollywood Monsters source code and design document were unavailable, Pendulo writer Josué Monchan revisited the game and attempted to "reverse-engineer ... the design" over the course of two months in 2008. He came to the conclusion that the puzzles, inventory, characters and overall quality fell below current standards. Monchan also believed that the first game was "a bit male chauvinist" in its use of female characters, particularly Sue Bergman, whom he considered an ornamental, submissive woman whose agency in the plot was vastly overshadowed by that of the male lead. The team later stated that she "left a lot to be desired" as a character. In one of its first major changes to the Hollywood Monsters formula, Pendulo chose to replace the protagonists. The creators noted that they "didn't really dislike HM protagonist Ron, but ... decided to leave them [both] in the grave". The Next Big Thing gradually grew into a reimagining of Hollywood Monsters, which Latiegui called neither "a second part, nor a remake". Seeking a format that could attract both newcomers and existing fans, Pendulo built on the foundation of the first game—retaining its core ideas and opening scenes—and developed the story in a new direction.

Monchan co-wrote The Next Big Thing with project lead Ramón Hernáez. Their script ultimately topped 500 pages in length. According to Monchan, they conceived a purposely "stupid story" and focused instead on dialogue and characterization, dedicating significant time to the creation of Sue's replacement Liz Allaire. The team wanted to write a "feminist game"; Monchan said that Hollywood Monsters male lead "had 80% prominence and she 20% ... [but now] she is 60% and he is 40%, and she is the one who takes action". He initially struggled to find a direction for Liz's character, until Hernáez suggested borrowing from Katharine Hepburn's role in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, a longtime dream of Monchan's. Monchan also drew from Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, from Elliot Reid (Scrubs) and Phoebe Buffay (Friends), from his ex-girlfriend, from his "craziest" real-life acquaintances and from himself. He later called Liz "the character from whom I learned the most and with whom I identify the most" across his career.